‘Freakonomics’ podcast is taping live in Philly this week

Podcasting royalty is coming to Philadelphia. Stephen J. Dubner, coauthor (with Steven Levitt) of the crazily popular book Freakonomics (four million-plus sold), brings his podcast offspring Freakonomics Radio to the Merriam Theater on Thursday to record a live episode.

Dubner’s sidekick will be frequent guest and cohost Angela Duckworth. She’s the MacArthur grant-winner and Penn professor of psychology who wrote the book Grit, also freakily popular.

They’re probing the most tantalizing and elusive of all questions, with potentially huge impact: Why do people do what they do? And what incentives can lead them to change?

Freakonomics Radio airs locally on WHYY-FM (90.9) at 2 p.m. on Saturdays. It’s based in “behavioral” economics — which focuses the science of human behavior on the economic decisions you and I make. That could be almost anything: the student loan debt crisis, parenting, why popularity may be killing the banana. In one episode, people get their 23andMe genetic profiles, learn they have risk factors they can change if they modify their behavior, and then … don’t.

“I enjoy having a show that can be about just about any topic,” Dubner says by phone. “I’m a little allergic to boredom. We always seem to keep finding things to be curious about.”

So what will happen Thursday night? “We’ll hear pitches from different people working on projects to change human behaviors,” Dubner says. “We’ll listen, poke holes as we always do, and then put it to the audience for a vote.” Sort of a behavior-change slam? “Sure,” Dubner says, “and who better to co-host than Angela?”

Duckworth has a witty, humane touch that makes her a good radio cohost. She single-handedly revived the word grit for our times. (“I had nothing to do with Gritty,” she hastens to say.)

She’s also, with Katherine Milkman and others, part of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at Wharton, which aims to improve the daily choices people make about health, education, and savings.

“What Angela and Katy are doing is so exciting,” Dubner says. “You have seven billion people on this planet making these decisions every day.”

“It actually started as a MacArthur proposal that failed,” jokes Duckworth, also on the phone call with Dubner. “But, gritty people that we are, we’re still working on it: How do people voluntarily change their behavior? Our challenges in 2019 are different from the problems that used to threaten us — shelter, food, transport, efficient exchange of information — but we’re still faced with basics such as self-control, diet, exercise.”

Change isn’t easy, Duckworth says. “Human beings are in some ways their own worst enemies. They continually make choices that actually undermine their own well-being. But we are seeing ‘nudges,’ signs that people here or there are on to something, and that’s what we’re studying.”

As for being a Freakonomics mainstay, Duckworth says, “I have no background in radio or stage stuff. I’ve just been kidnapped from my normal life to do this.” But she’s looking forward to the brave people who’ll compete at the Merriam.

With all this talk about changing behavior, it’s natural to ask: Have listeners ever heard something on Freakonomics Radio that inspired them to do something noteworthy?

“It’s one of the things that make me happiest,” Dubner says. One 2015 episode focused on Stanford University Nobelist Al Roth and how he and others revolutionized the organ donation market in the United States — and listener Steve Tucker of Washington state wrote to tell Dubner he was so inspired that he volunteered to donate a kidney.

There are bigger, policy-level examples. A 2010 episode broached the idea of a “prize-linked savings plan,” also called a “no-lose lottery.”

It combines the virtues of a banking savings account and a state lottery. You put money in the bank, and the bank puts the interest it would have charged into a big, huge pot — and it enters you, the saver, in a lottery. Winners are chosen at regular intervals. You can win, you can’t lose any money, and you have an incentive to save, which, as the world knows, Americans are terrible at doing.

Michael Gaudini, a Temple University grad, heard that 2010 episode and was so inspired that he worked for seven years to get the idea signed into Texas law. In 2017, he succeeded. “And we just got a letter from a listener who told his mom about the episode,” Dubner says. “She’s in the Hawaii state legislature, she started it on its way, and now it’s the law.”

Freakonomics Radio Live!

7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 6, Merriam Theater, 250 S. Broad St.

Tickets: $39.50.

Information: 215-893-1999, kimmelcenter.org.